Learning a Foreign Language Called Public Relations

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CreditCreditKoren Shadmi

By John D. Wagner

Jan. 3, 2015

It was an odd phone call, a request out of the blue to ghostwrite a book for a man who’d read a magazine column of mine.

I’d been struggling to get by on low-paying freelance assignments, as well as the occasional adjunct teaching job. At 42, with an M.F.A. in poetry, I was so broke that most of my phone calls were from bill collectors.

So I leapt at the ghostwriting job and worked epic hours to produce a 50,000-word book in just weeks, eager to get a $10,000 check in return.

The book, a self-published guide to Internet-enabled home-building techniques, was a surprising success, and the man’s theories quickly gained currency in the dot-com surge of 1999-2000.

In short order, he had raised $147 million to take his tech company public. But he needed an executive director for corporate communications, and that’s when my phone rang again, with an odder request. Did I want the job? I was shocked: I had worked only for magazines and as an English professor, never for a corporation.

The salary far more than doubled my income. When I got my first check, I half thought it was a misdirected signing bonus for a New York Yankees pitcher. Waving the check in front of my wife, I said, “Do people actually get paid that much for just five days of work?”

Yup. But they have to move their families across the country on the whim of a company, which is what I did, entering a world about which I was utterly clueless. I had suddenly moved from writing trade-magazine reviews of kitchen countertops to a world of acronyms, like C.O.B. (close of business) and C.A.R.G. (compound annual rate growth), while working alongside seasoned senior executives from giants like GE Capital and EDS.

I spent each workday in full wing-it mode. I’d never written a news release, although doing so was clearly an essential skill for my new position. Looking for a model, I went to IBM’s website to see how it was done. The chief executive of my company called me to his office after reviewing my draft, which announced another successful fund-raising round. I was certain that he had noticed the similarities and I’d be fired.

“Loved the release,” he said, “sleek, simple ... like IBM’s.” He said he wanted me to upgrade to first class to sit with him on a flight to New York, where we would explain our strategy to the investment bankers underwriting our initial public offering.

I was quickly put in charge of all corporate messaging, investor relations and financial communications for our dot-com. That was a rather risky portfolio to assign me, since I was always slinking off to call my dad and his retired executive friends to whisper into the phone questions like, “What does the acronym M.&A. mean?”

“I think that one is mergers and acquisitions,” Dad said in a defeated tone, after which I could almost hear him add, “Where have I failed as a father?”

I eagerly called Ron for advice, my notebook ready. Bless his heart — he tried to synthesize 40 years of corporate experience into one poetic recommendation: “You want to weave the story of current developments into the fabric of the company.” He said this as I imagined him moving his hands over and under each other like swimming dolphins.

“Weave plus fabric. Dolphins???” I wrote in my notes.

Just after I had hung up with Ron, I was called to the office of our powerful new chairman (who’d come from a major retail chain and was sure to see I was a fraud). “We’ve got $147 million at stake here, and a pending I.P.O.!” he said. “What’s our communications plan?”

Controlling panic, I did the dolphin gesture, moving my hands over and under each other, as I said, “I want to — how shall I describe it, Sir? — weave ... the ... story.”

The gentleman brightened. “English major?” he asked, pointing a finger at me, looking a little like Bob Hope.

“Yes, sir. Graduate degree; honors.”

“Me, too. You’re with us on that trip to New York, right? You’re our storyteller. Need you up there,” he said, pointing toward New York.

“Of course, sir.”

But one guy did have me figured out: our head of human resources. The dot-com had lured him from a Fortune 50 company. No softy, even though he was famous for people-focused policies, he was a skilled corporate infighter, with very sharp elbows. We went to lunch one day early on and he said, “You have absolutely no idea what you’re doing, do you?”

I confessed that I was a poet who, weeks earlier, had been writing about new countertop colors, and that I was shocked that I had even been hired.

“Well, if it’s any consolation, no one here knows what they’re doing,” he said with mock gravity. “They’re all making it up.”

Just after that, I flew to meet our investment bankers. (Hot breakfast and fresh-squeezed orange juice in seat 1A — a fellow could get used to this!) As we sat down in a wood-paneled office, the bankers’ team leader looked to me to explain the communications plan. It was to be a multibillion-dollar I.P.O., and he asked if I was going to start outreach on the buy side or the sell side.

Not a clue what he meant. None.

The room was dead silent.

I moved my hands. Dolphins swimming.

“Both sides,” I said, my voice rising with confidence as I spoke to the packed room. “I think we need to reach out to both sides at the same time. Safest thing to do with so much at stake, I’m sure you all agree.”

Like the people who nodded when Chance the gardener (from the movie “Being There”) said: “First comes spring and summer, but then we have fall and winter. And then we get spring and summer again,” the bankers looked at one another. The quiet wisdom of my statement! A collective nod rippled through the room.

“Wow, great plan,” the team leader said. “Seek out our in-house counsel in all actions, please. O.K., next, on to. ... ”

The entire life of the dot-com was an 18-month whirlwind, during which I flew 200,000 miles and mastered the art of submitting expense reports that stayed within our per diems yet somehow covered $200 bottles of wine and the occasional limousine joy ride.

I was employee No. 63 of an eventual 1,200-person work force, all of whom were soon out of work when the dot-com bubble burst. The endorphin high I’d gotten riding in another company’s private helicopter, eating in private dining rooms at New York investment banks and scoring global news coverage (because I was naïve enough to call up head editors and ask for it) all crashed when we failed to go public, and instead filed for bankruptcy.

On the day it all fell to earth, I looked outside my office window to see our laid-off employees — their Herman Miller chairs serving as freight trolleys for their belongings — being interviewed on TV about how it felt to fall from such heights to the back of the unemployment line.

Curiously, it was then, only at the end, that I realized I’d had some talent all along — and that the lessons I’d learned were not the minor ones of acronyms and business clichés. I’d learned the ability to craft meaningful, motivating stories — even about this grand failure.